Producing Assets: The Social Strife of Land

Forthcoming as: Swyngedouw E. and Ward, C. “Producing Assets: The Social Strife of Land”, in Wolford W. W., Peluso N. and M. Goldman (Eds.). The Social Life of Land. Cornell University Press, Ithaca, NY. Producing Assets: the Social Strife of Land Abstract The social life of land is one of struggle to appropriate resources and extract financial value; a struggle characterised, we argue, by ‘asset class war’. A fictitious commodity in Polanyi’s sense, land has both use value and exchange value but no value understood as socially necessary labor time. As a result, land has a distinct political economic role, which means that to understand its social life under capitalism requires theoretical attention. In particular, while land (and its appurtenances) has always been pivotal to sustaining expanded capital circulation, its enrolment into accumulation dynamics has been greatly intensified under financialized capitalism. The social life of land under financialized capitalism resides precisely in its potential to be enrolled as an asset in circuits of financial capital circulation. The problem of land has always been a vexed one in political economy. In Marxian political economy, this turns on the question how something that is not produced through socially necessary labor time can be imbued with exchange value. Explaining the particular nature of monetary returns that can be extracted from land has thus given rise to a sub-field of political economy centred upon the theorization of rent. In this chapter we will rehearse Marxist rent theory, highlighting the production and 1 distribution of rent, its central co-ordinating role in contemporary capitalism, as well as the relationship between rent production and the expanding circulation of fictitious (financial) capital, as crucial to understanding the social life of land in contemporary capitalism. Building on rent theory, we argue that the possibilities for rent production and extraction, and its subsequent insertion in circuits of expanding financial circulation, resides fundamentally in the process of ‘assetization’. This refers to the socially, politically, and culturally contested process through which land (or other things) is turned into an asset, so providing the potential basis for its insertion in the financialized capital circulation and valorization process. The making of land into an ‘asset’ involves not only the enclosure of imposing (private) property relations but also the formation of a wide range of institutional and regulatory configurations as well as calculable dispositifs that sustain its transformation into a fungible financial product. It is through the process of assetization that struggle over the distribution of societal resources unfolds most intensely, and around which divergent political claims crystallize in the present choreography of capitalist transformation. Conflict unfolds around the modalities of assetization and the associated distribution of access to resources and resulting profits – a nexus of sociotechnical contestation we refer to as ‘asset class struggle’. 2 Producing Assets The Social Strife of Land Erik Swyngedouw, Department of Geography, School of Environment, Education and Development, The University of Manchester, UK [email protected] Callum Ward, Bartlett School of Planning, University College London [email protected] 1. Asset class war under financialised capitalism ‘Nature’, as Raymond Williams (1976) claimed, may be the most complicated word in the English language but we would argue that ‘land’ runs it close. Land embodies a wide range of often competing and contested symbolic meanings, social attachments, material uses, and economic significations (Haila 2016; Li 2014a). Land and its appurtenances (the edifices constructed on, materials embedded in, cultural inscriptions conveyed through, or services provided by land) are central to organizing life in any society, strongly articulating with relations of gender, class, and race (e.g., Safranksy 3 2016). In this chapter, we use the lens of rent theory to focus on the way that land’s complex status as a material social relation intersects with its very particular but pivotal role in capital accumulation to argue that the social life of land under financialized capitalism is characterised by ‘asset-class struggle’. There is growing recognition that income and profit have become outweighed by wealth and rent in recent decades, meaning that societies’ surplus is accruing to asset-holders rather than wage earners (extensively evidenced in the work of Piketty, 2014; see also Christophers 2019; Birch and Muniesa 2020). In the Global North this has occurred primarily through residential land markets (Knoll et al. 2017), leading to debate over how we conceptualise class in an asset economy where social reproduction is increasingly dependent on housing wealth (Adkins et al. 2020; 2021). This turns on the treatment of land as a financial asset, meaning that land is being managed for its exchange value (as an investment) as opposed to its use value (e.g., in the case of residential land, as the site of a home). The mediation of fictitious capital is necessary to this because land values are based on rents which are expected to accrue over a matter of decades, meaning that to hold land as an asset requires a combination of institutionalized enclosure (to capture rents) and capitalization (to realise them in the present) that has been termed ‘assetization’ (Birch and Muniesa 2020). This process of land assetization is central to all manner of social struggles beyond the distributional impact of the treatment of residential land as a financialised asset in the Global North, for example through processes of land-grabbing, resource extraction, or large scale agricultural production. We are less concerned in this context with descriptive typologies of class as with the question of how this increasing centrality of 4 land rent has transformed the terms of engagement of class struggle itself (see Kaika and Ruggiero 2015). Specifically, as value grabbing — the appropriation of (surplus) value — rather than accumulation (the creation of new value) is increasingly central to the reproduction of contemporary capitalism (Andreucci, et al., 2017), social conflict unfolds over the distribution and appropriation of the flows of value that circulate in and through privatized assets. To unpack the particular class antagonisms produced by this institutionalized value-grabbing, we trace out the contours of mobilising land as a financial asset starting from the dynamics of land rent extraction. 2. The vexed question of land value The social life of land cannot be reduced to economic (exchange) value: there are enduring non-capitalist land regimes, and significant amounts of non-commodified land in liberal market economies (e.g. Whiteside 2017). Nonetheless, the capitalist valuation of land and its peculiar metrics permeate every nook and cranny of the earth’s surface, in conflict or direct competition with other, often localised, valuations and significations. It is precisely these competing significations that suggest understanding the dynamics of land-as-capital is pivotal for a multitude of social struggles and conflicts: in today’s era of financial globalization, for instance, even land that is not currently subject to capitalistic ownership will likely have been valued by prospective land grabbers. Such planetary rent gaps (Slater 2017) demonstrate that the potential for non-commodified land’s transformation into a financial asset is ever-present. Although land is intrinsically relational, it appears in market-exchange as a straightforward commodity: thing-like and fungible. But this fetishization – transforming the multiple meanings and values of land into the singular objectified 5 metric of exchange value – involves all sorts of ‘metaphysical subtleties and theological capers’ (Marx, 1981a), infusing the modalities by which land becomes enrolled in the capitalist accumulation process. The formation of fictitious capital, in particular, depends on contested narratives as to the future (Ward and Swyngedouw 2018: 1080), mediated by performative and cultural practices, which are reified as fungible assets through a process of ‘real abstraction’ (Mann 2018). In The Great Transformation. Karl Polanyi (1944) argued that land, labor, and money are ‘fictitious’ or ‘pseudo-’ commodities in the sense that they are treated as market commodities, but have no market-based production process. This echoes Marx’s view that (virgin) land has both use value and exchange value but not the thing that makes them commensurable – value, understood as socially necessary labor time. Socially necessary labor time is the average time required to produce a given commodity under historically given socio-technical conditions. Value in this sense permits a concrete articulation between the exchange value (the price) of a commodity, which renders it universally exchangeable with every other commodity on the one hand; and its particular use value (its specific and particular material, sensorial, symbolic or utilitarian qualities) on the other. Yet, if land is not produced through labor and so embodies no socially necessary labor time, how does it command value? Therein lie the theological capers Marx identified. The vexatious question to answer from a political economy perspective, then, is how land’s endless range of potential use-values are rendered commensurable in exchange. It is only through social construction – real abstractions – that this can be achieved. Such abstractions occur whenever the incommensurable is made commensurable in the 6 process of exchange – and this has occurred for many centuries – but has been increasingly formalized and systematized over the last century as investors, international organizations like the IMF or World Bank, and economists (and even some sociologists and anthropologist) constantly attempt to devise common denominators which render it possible to compare and contrast different use values along a generalized yardstick, as per the complex equations and pseudo-empirics of economists’ location theory (Alonso 1964; Muth 1969). Such perverse homogenizing calculative procedures became received wisdom following neoclassical economists’ rejection of any tension between use- and exchange value in the marginalist revolution (see Ward and Aalbers 2016), permitting the modelling of non-monetized use values into a universal exchange equivalence. However, things are rather more complex than these reifications allow for. Land, as property, entails exclusive control over access to specific portions of the globe (Marx 1894). Land values derive from the private enclosure (through parcellization into property) of land in which collective accumulation processes are territorially embedded. The landlord appropriates as rent a portion of the social product that flows through their parcel of land (Swyngedouw 1992). The generalization of market exchange as one of the central institutions through which everyday socio-material life is organized is now so complete that a price (an exchange value) can be assigned to practically every square inch of the earth’s surface. But the process through which land was alienated in this way entailed long, difficult, and frequently bloody enclosure movements, something that David Harvey (2003) re-dubbed ‘accumulation by dispossession’. This ongoing enclosure (see Goldman, this volume) is an arena of intense and often emotionally charged contestation. It invariably involves the mobilization of extra-economic 7 political and institutional processes through which private ownership is legitimized, legally codified, and policed by an authority, for example the state, considered to possess the legitimate monopoly on violence. Once land is parcellized as private property it must be mobilized as fictitious capital to enable a land market. Fictitious capital, distinct from Polanyi’s concept of fictitious commodities, is a tradeable claim to future wealth – specifically, it pulls the expectation of the extraction of future value (as socially necessary labor time) and trades that expectation as present exchange-value (see Harvey 1982). This capitalization of the socially necessary labor time which will be captured through rents is fundamental to the land market. The social life of land under capitalist market relations, then, consists in the first instance of the construction and maintenance of the institutional configurations necessary to perpetuate the fetishization of land as private property and sustain its mobilization as a financial asset. As such, the exchange value of land is determined by a complex set of semiautonomous but interdependent forces. These include the existence of generalized market exchange, the rendering of land as private property through institutionalized dispossession, the specific existing or potential use values of the land, past capital invested, the exchange value of commodities produced in or passing through the land and the corresponding anticipated future returns, credit conditions through which land can be capitalized, and so on. The practically infinite heterogeneity of potential use values constituting land are essential to its potential to acquire exchange value; yet the latter is predicated upon turning land into a commensurable and exclusive good. Through ongoing enclosure and abstraction into fictitious capital, the reductive 8 universal equivalent of exchange value is inserted into the complex relational composition of land so that these complexities are synthesized as a price through classstruggle in the form of landowners’ imposition of access costs on land users. Yet, if capitalized rent explains how land can command value without this value being necessarily produced through the mobilization of labor (in the sense of socially necessary labor time), it still remains to be explained how an unproductive agent such as a landowner can systemically capture value within a capitalist economy? It is upon this question that Marx’s rent theory turned. 3. The Production of Rent The starting point for Marx is that land is an entitlement to the landowner in return for surrendering the use of that land to someone else, much like interest on money is an entitlement to the lender. The basic insight is that the fundamental relationship through which rents arise is a social one determined by conflict between classes, i.e. between landowners, on the one hand, and those who wish to make use of the land, on the other (Ball, 1977; 1985), and not directly from the use values that inhere in the land. Rent, therefore, is a transfer of value produced elsewhere to the landowner. If the actual process of setting this rent is the outcome of institutionally mediated conflict though, there must be some basis in value to the user if landlords are to systematically make a claim to surplus value. Marx developed four basic categories of rent describing how land can be value-enhancing for the user of the land and, therein, produce a share of surplus that can be claimed as rent. These categories are: monopoly, absolute, differential rent I (DRI), and differential rent II (DRII) (Marx 1974; Harvey 9 1982; Ward and Aalbers 2016). These forms of rent, taken together, determine the magnitude of rent on a plot of land but are empirically indistinguishable as the rent is given in one payment as the result of negotiations that depend on many mediating factors (see Ball et al. 1985). The first, monopoly rent, relates to the specific and unique characteristics of a particular piece of land. Consider, for example, how the ownership of a plot of land in the Bordeaux wine region, near the Niagara Falls, or ice-cream stalls near a summer tourist attraction, generates surplus profit for the owner by virtue of the unique character of the land itself or its location. These unique characteristics create products that have few substitutable competitors, so creating a condition in which effective demand (how much people are willing and able to pay) is the only upper limit on the exchange value that the plot can command. The second, absolute rent, is the most complex and controversial category because it is not merely distributional but potentially affects the price of production. Absolute rent derives from the imperfect mobility of capital as a result of there being a class of landowners at all. For Marx, explaining the existence of absolute rent in the agricultural context, fragmented landownership and imperfect capital mobility through land blocks competition in the sector so that products tend to trade above their cost of production (Fine 1979; see Purcell, 2018). This has also been used to explain why particular (very often racialized) housing sub-markets have been subject to higher-than-average rates of exploitation (see the concept of Class Monopoly Rent, per Aalbers 2011; Anderson 2019; Harvey and Chatterjee 1974). While many Marxists argued that absolute rent would gradually disappear as the law of value imposed its iron logic across the globe, 10 recent observers argue that this form of rent is not only persistent but fundamental to an increasingly monopolistic capitalism (Amin 2018; Purcell et al. 2019). For example, many speculative urban developments precisely bank on such forms of absolute rent (Anderson 2019; Revington 2021). The third, DRI, is related to the qualities of land as a means of production or reproduction: it refers to the different qualities of land with equal amounts of capital invested in it. These differing qualities are the result of given, but usually historically – and thus socio-materially – produced, socio-spatial differences between different plots of land with respect to their ability to sustain the production of value when mobilized in a specific capital circulation process or situated in more favorable locations. For example, more fertile land or construction sites in highly desirable locations. Indeed, land of different qualities and locational attributes requires different mobilizations of socially necessary labor time to produce a given commodity with a given magnitude of capital investment. Similarly, plots with different qualities for reproductive functions attract greater rents – consider, for example, the effect well-regarded schools can have on local house prices. DRI, therefore, refers to the position of a particular plot of land in relation to all other possible positions and/or to its position within a larger geographical configuration (Swyngedouw 1992). The three forms of rent discussed so far can be defined as ground rent proper. The full land rent also includes the fourth type of rent (DRII). DRII also derives from different qualities of land but is generated by differential capital investments in pieces of land of equal quality. In other words, the qualities of land can be enhanced (and over time greatly so) by capital investment (engineering, infrastructural improvements, new or 11 upgraded buildings, ground improvement, soil engineering, state regulation, new investments for new functions in the built environment, etc.). This form of investment is comparable to capital investment in technological or organizational improvements in the production process. To the extent that this capital investment reduces the socially necessary labor time required for production on that plot, extra surplus value is generated. Marx defines this surplus, made possible by the sinking of capital into land, as DRII. DRII plays an important legitimizing ideological function for the land market as the value of appurtenances and improvements appear to the lay-person to account for the price paid but, in fact, additions to the land such as buildings are not the primary factor accounting for the final price and do little to account for long-term secular trends towards rising prices – this, as Knoll et al (2017) demonstrate in their empirical analysis of house prices across OECD countries in the last century, is attributable to the price of land itself. In sum, while rent accrues to the landowner by virtue of the monopoly ownership of land, the magnitude of land rent (and hence the price of land) is composed of four distinct components: monopoly and absolute rent, and DRI and DRII. Rent is the crucial variable through which socio-spatial and socio-ecological differentiation in the capitalist landscape is triaged. In a market system, access to land is structured by rent as the process through which specific qualities or use values embodied in place are transformed into the concrete abstraction of exchange value and appropriated by landowners. The production of rent and its appropriation by landowners (themselves increasingly embroiled with financial capital) animates all manner of conflicts in the social life of land as the spatial unfolding of capital operates through and actively produces a complex rent map which directs the distribution of 12 socio-spatial and socio-ecological functions. As such it plays a unique, often underappreciated, role in capitalism. 4. The role of land rent in capitalism: feudalistic drain or the motor of competition? The early stages of capitalism in Europe were marked by conflict between traditional aristocratic land-owning classes and the ascendance of industrialists. Restrictive landownership obstructs the maximization of surplus-value production, so the assumption of many twentieth century observers was that rent was an archaic feudal remnant. In this, rent was seen as a parasitic drain on profits that would be swept aside with the full development of capitalism (Haila 1990). Yet as the twentieth century progressed, it became increasingly clear that the historic defeat of the landed classes entailed not the abolition of land rent but its full integration into the dynamics and circulation of capitalism, specifically that of finance (Ball et al., 1985). While value is generated through the labor process, rent constitutes a drain on capital accumulation in that it is appropriated by the landowner purely by virtue of their ownership of the land. This pits landed capital against both productive and financial capital, as well as those who wish to make use of the land for reproduction (like housing or gardening) (Kaika and Ruggiero 2013). The categories of rent can be understood as identifying the socio-spatial relations upon which the landowners systemically succeed in capturing some of that value – through monopolistic means (monopoly/absolute rent) or the relatively enhanced position of the land (differential rent). Yet while the former, in particular, is often seen as a feudalistic drain on capital accumulation, both are pivotal to the everyday functioning of a capitalist economy. 13 First, the historic enclosure and privatization of agricultural land was one of the central processes through which a “free” and landless labor reserve army was produced as the separation of workers from their means of subsistence underpinned processes of proletarianization and the making of a “free” working class that had no other choice than to sell their own bodily labor force as a commodity on the labor market (Marx 1894). This form of accumulation by dispossession is an ongoing process that in part accounts for the accelerating migration of landless workers to the megacities of the Global South and North. Consider, for example, the extraordinary privatization and accumulation by dispossession that has taken place in post-socialist states like Russia or in China, where millions of people lost their attachment to land, and billions of dollars extracted as a market was created out of socialized land. Large-scale land grabbing in Asia and Africa in recent years is also indicative of this still ongoing process of mass proletarianization. These are examples of landowners asserting their exclusive hold over land as private property, the most fundamental form of absolute rent in that they impose a price below which they will not release the land. Second, the fact that the landowner takes the relative advantages of a plot of land as rent means that the capitalists cannot rely on spatial advantage. By ensuring that capitalists cannot live off monopolistic or differential advantages of location they ensure competitive dynamism for the capitalist system as entrepreneurs must thus rely on technological innovation or intensified labor exploitation for profits (Harvey 1982). That is, they ensure the equalization of the rate of profit in the context of uneven geographical development, flattening the differential profit rates that would otherwise accrue to businesses as the result of spatial advantage. The very existence of a 14 generalized land market ensures this is the case even where the capitalist owns the land: if they have bought the land in the market then this means bidding against others at a price determined by the profitable use they could put it to (with the successful bidder likely to have to pay commensurate mortgage payments). If the land is owned outright by the capitalist, the existence of a land market simply means that the conflict between the roles of landowner and capitalist is internalized because by putting the land to a less profitable use they are effectively losing what they could receive by renting the land out or selling it. Third, not only does land rent mitigate the effects of uneven spatial development on capitalist competition, but it actively remakes space to facilitate capital accumulation. As differential rent depends on enhanced relative advantage, profit-oriented landowners/developers seek to create such enhancements. DR1, recall, derives from the accrued locational advantages that have been produced over time as the collective outcome of many successive rounds of capital investments in space and its associated uneven development. The urbanization process is an excellent illustration of this process. Or they are the result of specific collective processes that assign specific and valued significations to a place, such as, for example, historical value, specific design qualities, particular produced effects (truffle-rich areas, for example). These collectively or socially produced “locational” effects have a great (and, over time, increasing) effect on land rents that the landowner can cash in irrespective of his or her own capital investment in the land. It follows that all manner of individual investments, collective interventions, changing socio-cultural significations, or state policies directly affect the magnitude of DRI. 15 Through these functions, land rent acts as an essential mechanism regulating the application of flows of capital and labor to land (Clark 1998). The rent relation orders the uses of land and organizes the spatial division of labor through its influence in allocating different moments, activities, and socio-technical forms of production to different places and, as such, land rent organizes, and regulates, in close articulation with the embodied specific use values, the landscapes of production and consumption. This allocation mechanism helps coordinate capital investment by assigning different forms of capital to distinct locations and activities, producing an unequal and uneven spatial division of labor, and a highly variegated and socially triaged geographical landscape (Harvey 1982), whereby the power of money secures access to the most highly valued locations. Here, as Harvey (ibid) argued, the treatment of land as capital whereby use follows exchange-value is an essential mechanism for the operation of capitalism: it reshapes socio-spatial processes according to the requirements of capitalism, ensures the equalization of profit amongst capitalists is possible within a context of uneven development, and provides an important means of capital absorption during periods of industrial stagnation through speculation on the built environment. This is not to say that rentiership has shed its ‘bad’ parasitical character in favor of ‘good’ entrepreneurial ones, but that this is one of the great contradictions of capitalism: competition and freedom in exchange relies on monopoly and the social and political violence of enclosure. The contradictory, conflictual nature of the production and appropriation of rent is a constant tension within capitalism as the rentier does not altruistically seek to ensure capitalism’s efficient functioning but simply seeks to maximize their own revenue. The extent to which they succeed or not depends on the conditions of class struggle, and the rentier class may always simply undermine their own basis in 16 accumulation by squeezing users too much. This dialectical tension between the inherently monopolistic nature of property and competition as the engine of capitalism is complicated further today by a condition of economic stagnation and financialization wherein the profitability of the capitalist system itself appears to have come to rely on monopolistic rents extracted through financial channels (Amin 2018). Putting aside wider questions of an emerging ‘rentier capitalism’ (Standing 2016), these functions demonstrate that land rent is one of the most powerful and contradictory drivers of the geographical political economy of capitalism. Not only does it pit landed against industrial and interest-bearing capital, but it is a determining factor in conflicts over competing uses of the land, such as for reproduction (housing, for example), resource exploitation (e.g., an ecological reserve or mine), particular cultural or symbolic values, or as a form of capital investment or factor of production. The nature and form of this constant struggle to appropriate value as rent characterizes the social life of land under capitalism. Insofar as land is mobilized as a financial asset, and therein its use decided by exchange value, landowners have a powerful structural incentive to engage in socio-political struggle in order to remake space according to the incentives of capital accumulation. 5. The Liquefaction of Land: Assetization and Financial Circulation In recent years, attention has focused on what Kaika and Ruggiero (2013; 2015) characterize as ‘the mobilization of land as a financial asset’. Land grabs by institutional investors have become a central theme in the Global South (Ouma 2018), while a global housing affordability crisis driven by housing financialization has dominated discourse 17 and practice in the Global North (Wijburg et al. 2018). As we argued above, land markets in general are predicated on the capitalization of rent through fictitious capital but, in recent decades, this has intensified so that titles to land function and circulate increasingly as pure interest-bearing capital comparable to other financial assets. This occurs both as investors select land investments based only on the risk-return profile required for their portfolio, and as real estate investments are bundled on secondary markets and sold as a de-spatialized income stream. In this, land markets increasingly function as markets in (paper) titles to future returns and so have become an integral part of, often speculative, fictitious capital circulation and accumulation (Andreucci et al. 2017). Blackstone or Macquarie Group, for example, are among the biggest international players in the field. The bundling and financial packaging of mortgages is another example. This is the fully developed capitalist form of the treatment of land as an exchange value, whereby an immobile good is rendered a liquid, footloose financial asset. This process of assetization, i.e. the socially contested and institutionally complex process of creating capitalized property, is the process by which exchange value is created from things that would otherwise not be exchangeable. As Birch (2015: 122) put it, assetization is “the transformation of things into resources which generate income without a sale”, drawing in capital markets through “the production of a specific form of financial knowledge … through which the social, material, and temporal aspects … are aligned with the money management industry” (Ouma 2018: 3). It is the making of a real abstraction (see Mann 2018; Toscano 2008; Ward 2021), in which the concrete, varied, and qualitatively specific values present in land are stripped down to quantitative market metrics, so rendering land commensurable with the universalizing 18 logic of exchange and its monetary basis. This process of abstraction is ‘real’ in the sense that it emerges through concrete socio-technical practices, and in that the emergent abstraction has its own material effects, actually performing (per Callon 1998) the process of realizing exchange values as it enters financial circulation. Land value today increasingly circulates as real abstractions in the form of financial assets. The social life of land, therefore, is increasingly to function as an asset base for nurturing the circulation of capital, something that articulates in conflicting manners with other real or potential uses of land. The creation of an asset entails the manifold social and institutional practices required to produce a liquid investment product, such as the imposition of regulatory frameworks, institutionalization of particular calculative models (Mann 2008), massaging of cultural norms (De Goede 2005), enrolment of socio-technical expertise (Fields 2019), and other legitimation procedures. The effective functioning of this market construction depends on appearing objective but is inherently objectionable and contestable: operations, in the first instance, of routinized and ritually codified power. The socially embedded and embodied nature of this process opens up a range of class and other struggles fought around the process of abstraction itself: who will be in a position to cash in on the generated exchange value stream and who will have access (or not) to the consequent distribution of goods/bads still inscribed in the fixed ‘thing’. These are the key contours of what we dub as asset class war. Producing assets is a power-laden, strategic, and complex procedure whereby landowners have to engage with a variety of extra-economic actors, most notably with the state at a variety of scales (Ward and Swyngedouw 2018) and confront competing and contested social, cultural, or ecological mobilizations of land. Because the socio-legal embedding of the ‘thing’ is a necessary corollary for it to function as circulating fictitious capital, the process of 19 making an asset is intrinsically political. Assetization cannot operate without the ‘Other of Exchange Value’, i.e. the crystallized socio-institutional configurations that permit it to flow. Recall that the exchange value of land is itself a legal fiction, a pseudo-commodity created by state enforcement of the excludability of a plot of land as private property, a parcellization of territorially embedded activity which allows its owner to claim a portion of surplus flowing through it. In the process of assetization this pseudocommodity is reified as another, money capital; becoming swept up in the dynamics of credit booms quite separate from any underlying activity in the process - as we saw in the 2007-09 sub-prime mortgage crisis. Yet these assets still depend on a flow of underlying income, and this is profoundly shaped by the particularities of the legal geography of landed property (Blomley 2003). Indeed, of all the diverse means of production and reproduction, land is among the most tightly regulated and intensely contested. An important reason for this is that the imposition of the rent relation introduces the fundamental contradiction of exchangevalue undermining existing use-values while producing new ones. The maelström of changing uses of land that is intrinsic to the social life of land under capitalism stands in direct opposition to historically produced long-term uses of land and the range of emotive, social, or material attachments to it. Sustaining the basis of accumulation within this complex panoply of contradictions requires the state (or another extraeconomic configuration) to regulate, manage, and coordinate the allocation and uses of land and, thereby, facilitate land markets as well as mitigating the inevitable conflicts both between competing interests for the land as between competing use values. 20 As such, not only is landownership (i.e., what one can do with one’s land) often strictly regulated by the state through zoning, building codes, planning (among others), but the state itself is an active agent in land markets (particularly through infrastructure planning and construction, public investment in urban development, eminent domain laws, and the like). Small changes in the rules governing land can have an extraordinary impact on the level of rent and, consequently, on profits generated through landownership. Consider, for example, how the state’s mobilization of “eminent domain” has been systematically used to dispossess some landowners and transfer the lands to fractions of capital guaranteeing a higher rent and return (e.g., in the construction of railroads, airports, seaports, large industrial estates, plantation economies in post-colonial states (Li 2014b), and the like). Needless to say, an intense, simultaneously inter- and intra-, class struggle unfolds over land use, land rights, and access to land. 6. Asset Class War: Rent as Accumulation Frontier We have traced out at length how land’s use values are repackaged into exchangeable abstractions. This process of real abstraction transforms them into pseudocommodities, which permits the appropriation and re-distribution of value while imposing the logic of self-expanding capital circulation on land’s manifold use values. This not only pertains to land but also to a proliferating number of other ‘things’ that are turned into assets that can subsequently circulate as fictitious financialized capital (Muniesa and Birch 2019; Purcell et al. 2019). This process has become a pivotal terrain through which the circulation of capital articulates today. The analysis of the (exchange) value of land, therefore, permits casting new light on some of the most 21 intricate and forceful, yet little understood, dynamics of contemporary capital accumulation. The analysis of ‘assets’ and ‘assetization’ can, and indeed should, be extended to the proliferating set of social, natural, or socio-ecological constellations, which characterize the contemporary economy. Key examples are H20 (Swyngedouw 2005), CO2 (Felli 2014), patents on GMOs (Prudham 2007), wind (Alonso Serna 2019), ecosystem services (Hernandez 2019), superior urban locations or designated monopoly land (Champagne, Buffalo Mozarella), and may even include ‘organic’ labeling for food (Guthman 2002), social networks (Rigi and Prey 2015), branded goods, and culture (Harvey 2012). Some of these assets contain value as socially necessary labor time – in the sense that they are created through a production process – but a significant part of their exchange value is determined by the property regime and rent entitlements. Indeed, increasingly, productive sectors are transformed into arenas of rent extraction through (public or private) reregulation; for example, in the construction of artificial exclusivity in platforms such as the shift of jet engine manufacturers from selling engines themselves to selling exclusive subscription-based maintenance services (Srnicek 2016). In this way, a class of rentiers are increasingly “profiting without producing” (Lapavitsas 2013, 793). Arguably, therefore, value grabbing — the appropriation of (surplus) value — rather than accumulation (the creation of new value) is increasingly central to the reproduction of contemporary capitalism (Andreucci, et al., 2017). We maintain that such a perspective has far-reaching consequences for situating a wide range of new socio-ecological movements, tensions, and class conflicts as they unfold not only over institutionalized property regimes and entitlements, but also over the 22 distribution and appropriation of the flows of value that circulate in and through privatized assets. While the social relations of capital valorization in production unfold through the capital-labor relation, the rent-based social relation unfolds through class struggles over ownership of assets and the payment for the right and modalities of their use. Tensions and conflicts increasingly emerge not only between classically productive and new forms of rentier capital but also over property rights and regimes, and the institutionalized redistribution of value through rent and interest payments. Moreover, such entitlements are easily monetized and this can, in turn, lay the foundation for their abstraction into fictitious capital formation and circulation. Securitized mortgages on land and housing are of course a case in point, but similar arrangements are in place for, among others, carbon credits, mineral resources, water, wind, or eco-services payments. We are now in a position to return to the vexed question of land rent and its materiality in the present conjuncture. Unpacking the rent relation opens up a vast new terrain of class struggle that we must understand to grasp the social life of land, and contemporary capitalism more generally. In particular, conflicts and struggle arise over the modalities of property-formation, the configuration of use values, and the intense struggle over the distribution and appropriation of the subsequent rents. Rent, understood as a social relation (Haila, 1990), unleashes an intense inter- and intra-class war, which mobilises a range of social actors, institutional configurations, and state strategies. The social life of land around the world today is precisely that it is caught up in the multiple tensions, contradiction and conflicts that animate the uneven and combined development of financalized capitalism. 23 The proliferation of private property under neoliberalization relations significantly expands the terrain for rent extraction and related struggles. The very possibility of rent relations and its associated struggles is predicated upon the deepening and further generalization of capitalist social relations of ownership and dispossession that remains the basis for surplus value production. At the same time, establishing private property rights is not just a basis for the self-expansion of capital, but a central nexus in the struggle over the appropriation of rents. Escalating socio-ecological and political conflict around property regimes and private appropriation of a variety of ‘assets’ shows clearly that new forms of social struggle and different layers of class conflict are unfolding over who captures rent and who pays it. Whether we consider the quest for land for bio-energy sources like sugar cane or aeolian energy, capturing high-value mineral deposits, or prestige urban development projects, they all demonstrate the highly contested and conflict-ridden choreography unfolding over and through land. These class conflicts unfold between different classes and through varied configurations of institutions and scales of the state. On the one hand, conflicts increasingly lead to intensifying inter-capitalist struggles between owners of extractable rent and industrial capitalists (that is, the owners of the means of production mobilized for the expansion of value) (Kaika and Ruggiero, 2015). On the other hand, popular struggles occasionally unfold in parallel, but often in tension with, more traditional working class struggles that develop over the appropriation of surplus value as produced in the expanded reproduction of capital. Such popular struggles are not primary located along the traditional workplace based capital–labor relation, but articulate and orchestrate around property regimes and asset ownership, the distributional dynamics of capital, and over different use-values of land —reflected, for 24 example, in the increasing mobilizations and struggles articulated around the commons emerging across the world, or the proliferating conflicts over mining and resources extraction in Latin America or Africa (Arboleda, 2020). They bring together apparently heterogeneous social identities—consumers, non-capitalist producers, workers, men, women, intellectuals, and others—whose politicization does not relate to their role within the relations of production, but rather to their position with respect to the distribution of value, socio-ecological amenities, and relations of reproduction. These distributional forms of inter- and intra-class conflict are one of the central axes around which anti-capitalist struggles coalesce today. Consider, for example, the militant mobilization against the Dakota Access Pipeline that broke out in 2016. In relation to rent, socio-ecological conflicts unfold over the appropriation and distribution of value as well as contestation over the underlying property relations upon which the extraction of rent is predicated. First, struggles over value distribution enabled by the rent relation are, strictly speaking, class struggles over rent. While this has traditionally been considered an intra-class struggle between rentiers (‘landlords’) and industrial capitalists, popular classes can exploit this contradiction and the barrier to capital it creates in order to force a downward redistribution of value—by, for example, demanding public institutions capture and redistribute a share of rent. While these struggles are often not consciously and explicitly articulated as being about rent per se, in essence they deal with the redistribution of value that has been grabbed. Second, struggles over the creation of property rights are instances of struggles against pseudo-commodification. As mentioned, these include the enclosure of land and resources, patenting of genetic material, the private appropriation of knowledge, privatization of public housing or state-owned land. In short, they manifest themselves 25 typically as struggles for and over ‘the commons’ with respect to the extent to which they are appropriated (or not) as financial assets and to whose benefit. 7. The Social Strife of Land. In this paper, we have teased out essential features of the social life of land under capitalism. The first being that land, in the general sense, is social life. Beyond what is not sea, there is no standardised object we could call land, and certainly no commodity produced as such. Land embodies no value in the sense of socially necessary labor time, but is the manifold spatially embedded, socially produced use-values; the ‘universal means of production’ (Marx 1894) and of social reproduction as the raw material of the production of space (Lefebvre 1972). Specific territorial configurations, in combination with technological innovation, determine the conditions of production and land gains its exchange value as the private appropriation of these spatially embedded social flows of value (Swyngedouw, 1992). The social life of land under capitalism, then, is a tension-laden one as the collective, relational good of space – literally the sum of material human metabolic interaction – is parcellized by private property relations and traded as a pseudo-commodity. Yet the brute force of enclosure alone cannot create value beyond one-shot primitive accumulation. How do we account for the persistence of a land market given that the commodity being traded does not embody value qua socially necessary labor time? The answer Marx came to, as we outlined, was the relations of rent in their differential, absolute and monopoly forms; denoting the surplus value-enhancing features of a particular plot, which the landowner siphons off as an access-charge. Social life, as 26 materialised in land, is thus forced into the commodity-form on the basis of rent appropriation. To the extent that land becomes treated as a financial asset and so exchange values dominate use, land then acts as a mechanism to ensure a laboring population through the dispossession of ‘commoners’, ensuring capitalist competition by removing industry of profit from spatial advantages, and, in this, incentivising landlords to reshape space according to the requirements of capital accumulation. Marx’s answer to this puzzle thus paints the broad contours of how the relations of rent shape the socio-spatial process, but the specifics of how to extend this analysis to the present financialized conjuncture remains hotly contested. In this chapter, we have contributed to doing so through a Marxist interpretation of land assetization, which highlights the social strife it engenders. We pointed to how the material flows of social life embedded within land become liquefied in capital’s drive for fungibility. Once enclosed as property and so imbued with exchange value, land is subject to ‘real abstraction’ (see Mann 2018; Toscano 2008). Real abstraction entails the concrete socio-technical process of transforming and creating quantified, exchangeable, material representations. Under conditions of financialization this transformation of things into assets (Muniesa and Birch 2019) can quickly become untethered from their underlying socio-material processes they represent (Ward 2021), becoming responsive primarily to the dynamics of fictitious capital and therein the calculative practices of the money management industry (Ouma 2018). Having been assetized, there is a tendency for land to become less responsive to social use-values as it becomes mobilised as a pure financial asset (Harvey 1982; cf Haila 1990). 27 It is in this way that ‘pseudo-commodities’ – assets – have become central to the contemporary economy. Pseudo-commodities appear like commodities in circulation but have no value proper in production; they are based on ongoing ‘value-grabbing’ through the rentier relation. This is an ongoing feature not only of the land market, but of a number of critical growth sectors and contemporary innovations through which the frontiers of rentiership are being extended. Here if, as some have recently argued, we are entering a new era of ‘asset-manager capitalism’ (Braun 2018), ‘rentier capitalism’ (Lapavistas 2013; Standing 2016; Christophers 2019), or even an ‘asset condition’ (Muniesa et al. 2019), then the way that the institutionalised value-grabbing this entails produces particular class-antagonisms is crucial to understanding social conflict today. This value grabbing necessarily embroils the state or other forms of regulation in the ongoing maintenance of numerous forms of appropriation that reach into every facet of social reproduction, entailing intensely political struggle. The social life of land under capitalism, then, is characterised by asset class wars. 28 References Aalbers, M.B. 2011. Place, Exclusion and Mortgage Markets. 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